The van was abuzz, as could be expected, with talk of the little contretemps between Robinson and Fairweather.
"I don't know what to think," a woman by the name of Susie Scace said. "I came to hear Robinson. I'd be the first to admit it. He doesn't have the academic credentials, it's true. But you can't fault the work he's done in Chile, and he's done amazing things in Bolivia and Peru, too. I do believe there is such a thing as a talented amateur—somebody who just has a feel for the subject. Maybe he couldn't afford to go to university like Fairweather."
"He sure gets his hands on the big bucks," an impish little man with a white goatee and big ears interjected. He made me think of hobbits and was sitting near the back of the bus with a woman I assumed to be his wife. "I am deeply envious, having worn holes in the knees of my pants begging for money for my own work over the years. If it were not for my wife Judith here and her hugely successful medical practice, I would not have been able to come."
"You're a kept man are you, Lewis?" Dave said good-naturedly.
"I am," he said. "Retired last year."
"He's an expensive little muffin," his wife said.
"I'm Lewis Hood, also known as Poikeman," he said, waving in our general direction. Moira and I introduced ourselves.
"They're not maniacs," Dave said. "Poikeman won't mean anything."
"I have no idea what they're talking about either," Judith said, smiling at us.
"I wish I'd been there when Fairweather showed up," Brian Murphy, the young man from the University of Texas looking for a job, said. "Fairweather was trained by Bill Mulloy. Mulloy!"
"Who's Bill Mulloy?" Moira said.
"Wow, you don't know?" Brian said. "He's a legend. Mulloy came out with Thor Heyerdahl in the mid-fifties. Long after Heyerdahl left, Mulloy worked on. He was responsible for some of the best archaeological work done on the island. He and his team restored Ahu Akivi and the ceremonial village at Orongo. We'll be seeing them later. He's dead now."
"He's buried here," an older man offered. "That's how much the place meant to him. He worked here for years and years. I'm Albert Morris, by the way. To modify a phrase, please don't call me Al. I'm Albert, currently from Montana. I'm retired, too. I was a PR consultant in Washington until a couple of years ago, a spin doctor, to use the vernacular. I'm fascinated by archaeology, so I volunteer at dig sites all over the world. Anybody who'll have me."
"Do you notice how we're always giving ourselves away?" Moira murmured. "Laying bare our complete ignorance of people like Bill Mulloy for everyone to see?"
"All I'm saying is that people can teach themselves about a subject. Learning does not all happen in the formal education system," Susie said.
"I couldn't agree more, Sandy," Dave said. "Take me, for example. I'm a builder, a developer. But I have a theory as to how the moai got from the quarry to the ahu. Just figured it out one day. I hope you'll all come to my presentation. It's the day after tomorrow, at eleven in the morning. You'll have lots of time to get over your hangovers from the night before, so you will have no excuse not to come."
"What I would like to know," said a woman who looked to me as if she'd been blown off course on her way to an audition for a remake of a 1940s' movie set in Budapest and ended up on Rapa Nui by mistake. She was dressed in a style I would describe as pseudo-gypsy, a brightly colored dress with a gathered skirt, a scarf over her head, and far too much in the way of both makeup and bracelets. "Was anyone here present when that man made his prediction about an imminent death at our hotel?"
"Did that really happen?" Lewis Hood said. "Everybody was talking about it at breakfast, but nobody actually heard the guy say it."
"We did," Moira said. "The man's name is Tepano, and he spoke in Rapanui, but Rory Carlyle understood and told us what he said." There had only been a handful of people present when Tepano had made his pronouncement, but news obviously traveled fast in this pack.
"I think that's really spooky," Yvonne said. "I keep looking at that pile of dirt. I can't stop. You can see it from the dining room. Sometimes I think it looks bigger than it did the last time I looked at it, and I'm afraid someone is buried there."
"Nonsense," Albert said.
"It is far from nonsense," the gypsy, who had introduced herself that morning as Cassandra, said. "I believe the people here know things most of the rest of us don't, that they are in touch with powers the rest of us have lost the ability to contact. Here people are in touch with their aku-aku, the spirits, who are very much with us. Rapa Nui may be all that's left of the lost continent of Lemuria, and we know what that means."
"We do?" Yvonne said.
"You mean Atlantis, don't you?" Moira said.
"Atlantis is in the Atlantic Ocean," the woman said in a condescending tone. "Lemuria, or the Land of Mu, is the continent that once joined India and Australia."
"I'm thinking you are maybe not glad you asked this question," Enrique Gonzales said.
"There I go again," Moira said. "Looking like a complete ignoramus."
"And this has what to do with the dire prediction of last night?" Albert said.
"The people of Lemuria were very artistic and spiritual," the woman said. She had a compelling voice, deep and throaty, and I found myself hanging on every word, even if I thought everything she said was hogwash. "Unlike the people of Atlantis, I might add, who were much more scientific. It's possible that both Atlantis and Lemuria were destroyed by a scientific experiment on Atlantis gone wrong."
"Could this possibly be the lunatic fringe Rory was telling us about?" Moira whispered. "I don't feel so bad now."
"The people of Lemuria had extraordinary powers," the woman said. "Powers way beyond anything we know today. I believe, as many do, that they came from another planet."
I heard a quiet snort from Seth Connelly, the rongorongo expert, who had heretofore kept his mouth shut. "Somebody here is from another planet," he muttered.
"Rapa Nui people may have retained some of the powers of the Lemurians," the woman said. "The people here know about the spirit world. They know the aku-aku are very much with us. I believe their ability to sense the aku-aku comes from some vestigial power transferred to them by the Lemurians."
"Vestigial?" Yvonne said.
"My theory," Susie, practical woman that she obviously was, said, "is that intuition or dreams about the future are nothing more than our subconscious trying to tell us something. You know, you dream about the wheels falling off your car because there really is something wrong, some vibrations or something, that your subconscious detected even if you didn't consciously notice, and the dreams are trying to warn you. Am I making sense?"
"Spooky," Yvonne repeated. I resisted pointing out that even if one accepted the argument about dreams and the state of your car, which I probably did, it did not establish what it was about the pile of dirt that could have indicated to Tepano's subconscious that somebody was going to end up dead there. One thing I had in common with Yvonne, though, was that every time the pile of dirt was within eyesight, I couldn't keep my eyes off it.
"If anybody is going to die there," Lewis said. "It's going to be Jasper Robinson. And my money will be on that fellow Fairweather as the culprit. They should just pick him up immediately." We all laughed, all except the gypsy, that is.
"I think Jasper was unkind to those workmen," Susie said. "I'd agree with Robinson that the idea that the moai walked to the ahu is pretty preposterous, but still, he shouldn't have made fun of them like that."
"Who is to say they didn't walk?" the gypsy said. "Power is concentrated here."
"That walking moai story, however preposterous, does rather speak to the moai being moved in a vertical position," Albert said. He was having no truck with the gypsy.